Habs 1992-93 season flashback: Roy shines in tie with Capitals

As we wait and hope for an end to the NHL lockout, Canadiens fans can relive the 1992-93 season – the last year the Habs won the Stanley Cup – at HIO as we post game stories from that season.

The Habs took a 15-5-2 record into a game against the Washington Capitals at the Forum on Nov. 23, 1992. Below is Red Fisher’s story from that game.

Note: RDS will show Game 5 of the 1993 Cup final between the Canadiens and L.A. Kings – a series the Habs won 4-1 – at 7 p.m. on Saturday.

Goaltenders steal show; Caps and Canadiens snipers fit to be tied

RED FISHER
THE GAZETTE

CANADIENS 1
CAPITALS 1

Stephan Lebeau, a gentle soul who almost never complains about anything, was muttering quietly on this night.

“Are they back?” he wondered aloud in the wake of this 1-1 struggle with the Washington Capitals. “Is the hooking back? The holding? The last game against Ottawa … I don’t think I’ve ever seen as much of it. Tonight, again.”

It could be that the hooking and holding – which attracted a flood of penalties during the first six weeks of the schedule, and now barely rates a second look – was the reason Lebeau, for example, had his six-game points streak snuffed out.

It may even be that scoring opportunities by other Canadiens were erased that way, but when a team outshoots the opposition 37-26, as the Canadiens did, perhaps a better idea would be to look at the goaltenders.

Start with Don Beaupre.

“He was great,” agreed Lebeau.

Add Patrick Roy.

“He’s always great,” said Lebeau.

This one belonged to the goaltenders, up to and including the overtime, when Roy was a game-saver.

It happened three minutes into into it when somehow, Kelly Miller was allowed to sweep in alone on Roy from the side.

“If you don’t pokecheck him just at the right time,” the suggestion was made to Roy, “you’re in big trouble.”

“If I don’t pokecheck him,” said Roy, “it’s in the net.

“I should have had a shutout,” he continued. “I went down too fast on their goal.”

That one was scored by Todd Krygier early in the second period, after John LeClair’s sixth goal of the season midway through the first had provided the Canadiens with a 1-0 lead. After that, it was goaltending time.

How good was Roy? Put it this way: If a game’s rest (he sat out Saturday’s 3-1 victory over Ottawa) is what Roy needs to be on top of his game, a little more R and R should be a priority from here onward.

A guy’s game doesn’t get higher than, let’s say, the goal he took away from Michal Pivonka during a Washington power play in the first period. And quickness was what he was all about in the overtime when he spoiled what could have been a party for Miller.

Then, of course, there’s Beaupre, who has been absorbing a generous measure of heat from coach Terry Murray in recent weeks.

“That’s true,” agreed Washington general manager David Poile, “but the fact is, Beaupre has been been having his problems late in the game. He’s done very well early, and lost it in the last few minutes. We’d be leading 4-2 late in a game, and the next thing that happened is that we were down, 5-4.

“We haven’t been getting the complete package.”

Until last night, that is. Beaupre was merely exceptional during the first two periods, particularly in the second period when he held off 18 Canadiens shots. A 19th by Mathieu Schneider beat Beaupre, but a chap named Mark Faucette ruled otherwise.

Referee Faucette called back the goal in the final minute when, in his judgment, Kirk Muller was in the crease while the puck was going in the net. Muller was indeed in the crease – before Schneider’s shot beat Beaupre. However, he was out of it before the puck was hissing beyond the Washington goaltender. The Canadiens held a two-man advantage at the time.

This was, in every way, a Beaupre-Roy event. Both were responsible for game-saving stops. Beaupre made more, but Roy contributed his share. What’s also certain, though, is that both goaltenders needed a little help from their friends along the way.

Roy was the difference in a one-on-one confrontation with Miller early and late in the game, but Al Iafrate had an open side early in the third – and flubbed his shot.

WITH NO HOCKEY TO WATCH, HERE ARE THE
TOP 10 WAYS GEOFF MOLSON IS SPENDING HIS SPARE TIME:
1. Go bowling with the guys more
2. Driving around the Molson center counting the shops that have gone under.
3. Teaching the kids how to crush competitors at Monoply
4. Chopping wood for the elderly neighbour
5. Watching reruns of Davinci’s Inquest while eating beans from a can
6. Drive through St. Henri and look at poor people
7. Learning how to make homemade wine
8. Fixing that dang dripping faucet in the guest spa
9. Practicing saying “I believe in our coaching staff and our GM” in both official languages with a straight face
10. Singing “100 Bottles of Beer on the Wall” – again!

I know #6 isn’t “nice” but I lived down there one year when I was a student. It’s a rough area… and you can see a lot of sadness. My point (to the extent I had one) was to highlight that I don’t want to read a story about Geoff Molson’s stiff upper lip in hard times. Really. It’s an insult to people with real problems – like how to feed their kids.

I lived on Delinelle for a year. So I hear you.
But I honestly don’t think he’s that type of person. Yes, he’s wealthy, although not to the ridiculous extent of the Jacobs’ of this world.
He’s a humble young man and a philanthropist, and gives a lot of his time to local worthy causes. That’s more than I can say about most wealthy locals (can you say Pierre Peladeau?).

You’re probably right (about Molson). But frankly, if he was really in the “good guy” camp he’d be bending Bettman’s ear and getting some sh#* done. You’re part of the solution or part of the problem. It doesn’t sound like he’s been very involved and he should be.

From what I’ve read and heard about Bettman, he has a long memory and can be quite vindictive. Molson is in a tough spot when it comes to dealing with Bettman and the other owners. If he starts making too many waves, Bettman finds other ways to screw over Molson and the Habs. Even a couple years ago with the Chara incident, I suspect Molson was pretty outspoken about the whole event and it didn’t get him anywhere. In fact when sponsors of the Habs presented outrage, Bettman essentially told them where to go.

He has to work in small and measured steps along with other owners. This again goes back to my despisement of Jacobs, Snider etc… who seem to be the ones pulling the marionette strings on Bettman.

Wow, you extrapolated something from the article in the other thread that I never read in it. I don’t get the jump from Molson saying he is an optimist to his (or Stubbs) implying Molson is going through hard times. Perhaps you have other reasons for your apparent loathing of Geoff Molson, because I don’t see how it would develop from that Stubbs article. As for implying Molson enjoys suffering poor people, I don’t see that either. From what I have read, Geoff is continuing in his families long and respected history of philanthropy. Again, I don’t know the guy personally, so perhaps you know him better and are aware of some despicable things he has done to earn your scorn.

So the League will be announcing today, further game cancellations to Dec 14.
Screw em! Now, about my Fav. Tourney The World Juniors. Canada looks like they could have one of their best squads in years . Gettin Pumped Amigos!!!

Because a union agrees to work under the conditions of a CBA, the league can make its own rules. The player draft and restricted player movement fall under this. IF the union decertifies (notice how large I made it?), the players are all single free agent entities who must be paid according to their contracts. In other words, you can’t lock us out if we do not belong to a union. Now, all players can sue for damages, etc, but suddenly all the perks of private jets and people looking after their equipment all goes away. In other words, a legal mess. I have no doubts that this will be Fehr’s next “tactic”.

Decertification will be a long, drawn out legal battle, with the NHL potentially losing the salary cap and cost certainty they worked so hard to achieve last time, as well as things like RFAs, the ability to trade players, the draft, and other restrictive practices that are so much the fabric of their professional sports system.

Will they want to take the risk of getting into a legal battle that could result in them losing a lot of the power they gained through the last lockout? Do the owners want to sit out 2 or 3 years and lose many of the rights they gained through various CBAs over the years?

I wouldn’t be so sure. REmember the NFL might have won some preliminary motions, but neither the NFL nor the NBA wanted to go down the road to a full blown anti-trust trial, and made their offers significantly better after decertification than they were before in order to settle a CBA, and have the players re-form the union.

Its important to note that even though the NBA had the precedents from the summer from the NFL.. they still didn’t want to fight the legal battle. The NBA players decertified November 14, 2011, the offers got better and the NBA settled November 28th.

This is the attempted strategy of any decertification move. The players don’t want to lose 2-3 years of their careers in courts, and the owners wont want to lose their salary cap and other restrictive rights that they have over player’s careers. Its a nuclear weapon… give us a realistic settlement or we go to court with the chance of destroying everything that keeps your costs down in this sport, and turning every star and every prospect into a UFA and getting all out bidding wars started.

Forcing this thing all the way to an anti-trust trial is the ultimate declaration of “all out nuclear war” by both sides. Neither side will really want it to get that far, and the PA will hope decertification would force the owners to come out with a more realistic offer as it did in the NFL and NBA.

Heck there might even be some preliminary dates, some hearings, some motions, some injunctions out there, all of which will be temporary, but neither side will want to go too far down the path towards trial.

Its the ultimate game of chicken.

People think we’ve been playing chicken now, that the players have their backs to the wall with the season to lose… and thats true. But De-Certification introduces a whole new ball game, it gives the owners something real, LONG TERM and tangible they could lose in the salary cap, draft, etc…. Its such a bigger threat to them, than one lost season, which is the only threat they really have now. They know that Fehr can’t realistically go after them for much in the context of a CBA negotiation, and that is why they still haven’t offered a single concession.

1) force the owners to put a real settlement on the table.
2) We are going to court, it might take long, it might take a lot of money… no one knows what will happen… but the result of the court case either F’s the players hard, or F’s the owners hard, its a 50/50 chance of changing the entire sports landscape as we know it.

And few lawyers will recommend their client go down path 2, too risky.

What I fail to understand, and hope you can enlighten me here…
What would Fehr’s role be if they were to successfully de-certify?
Would he go from being the NHLPA representative to the players’ legal council, that is assuming they were to retain him?

What I get from all this PA backlash is that anyone who is capable of basic math (50% of any season revenue is alot more than 57% of nothing) is going to be berated and branded as a traitor. It’s a sad day for logic.

That’s a fair point. The difference though is that the owners can hold out alot longer than the players can, which gives them the leverage in this fight, which means the players are the ones who need to “give” for this to end. That’s always been the case.

Don’t get me wrong here, I’m not condoning what the owners are doing, I’m just realistic. Either the players take a pay cut or there’s no hockey.

The pay cut they are agreeing to is an across the board cut from 57% to 50%. Any contracts signed after the new CBA will be for less than they would have gotten on the old CBA. The “make whole” shouldn’t even be an issue. Owners signed those contracts under the old CBA and those contracts should be honoured.

Players should be collecting their insane paychecks and playing hockey. Brouwer saying that he can’t trust Neuvirth and Hamrlik on the ice because of their stance on the lockout is just plain stupid. The idiots that ousted Kelly are to blame for all this s–t.

Guys,Guys…I could have been First but I chose not to. I could say I was being polite but really its is a result of being a Frontenac fan and its inherent acceptance of all things”not” First. With the one exception of First on the Golf course every spring.

What happened to Commie? He’s been sleeping by the keyboard, refreshing every 30 seconds.
I thought his being first from now on was a right of passage.
But you’re still no. 1 my friend.
Even if you laugh at me….

Hey Bri, you gonna watch Vanier Cup Part 2 tonight? I am hopeful it can be close to as good as the one you saw last night. I wonder if this Quinlan kid may also have a shot at the CFL. I know he had some off-field stuff, but hopefully he has matured.

I’m not aware of his antics Gerry.
And I’ll be recording it. It’s my poker night.
Besides, I’m in the habit of watching games long after they’re finished.
Will you?
Say one thing, if it’s anything like last night’s (year’s), it’ll be one helluva game!